Visualising the European network of digital social innovation

Over the past year, we’ve been mapping digital social innovation (DSI) through our platform for projects and organisations across Europe who are using digital technologies to tackle social challenges. We’re excited to announce that our interactive visualisation of the digitalsocial.eu database is now live!

Since beginning our work on DSI back in 2012, we’ve built up a crowdsourced database of over 1,200 organisations and 800 projects using existing and emerging technologies - like online platforms, open hardware and software, citizen sensing kits and blockchain - and harnessing the power of the crowd to address challenges in fields like healthcare, education, employment, environment and democratic participation. You can search and find out more about these organisations and projects on the digitalsocial.eu website.

In February we started working with Turin-based graphic design studio TODO to create a visualisation of the database - and it’s now available for you to explore.

We’ll be using the data visualisation to gather key insights about the European DSI network as part of our research into supporting the growth of DSI. We’ll be launching that research at our final event, What next for digital social innovation?, at Nesta on Tuesday 16 May. There’s still a few spaces left - we hope to see you there.

You can use the data visualisation, which is compatible on desktop and mobile, to explore the organisations and projects working on DSI across Europe, and to understand the community through different lenses. For example, you can view where organisations are located geographically; you can see how projects and organisations are linked to each other and you can see how projects are clustered around particular social areas, technologies and countries. In all the views, you can filter to see particular types of organisation, specific technologies they're using, or which social areas they are working in. You can also search for specific organisations at the touch of a button.

The map of digital social innovation organisations across Europe.

If you’re on the map, you can also visualise your own network - the organisations who are around you, the other organisations you work with, and the projects you work on. You can then share that specific view with your own networks.

An example of how you can sort projects. Here, you can see how projects in different social areas are using different technology trends in DSI.

So if you’re working on digital solutions to social challenges, make sure you’re on the map! Register your profile here (it only takes five minutes) - and if you’re already on there but your profile is getting a little out of date, please do update it. And finally, please do get in touch with any feedback, questions or concerns: [email protected].

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Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing
lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society.